The connection of wires, coaxial cable and flat or ribbon cables to other connectors has been done by trapping or sandwiching a printed circuit board within a housing. The printed circuit board carries the edge contacts and attaching pads for terminating the conductors and shielding wires, if any. Of necessity, the printed circuit board must be thin and, therefore, fragile and/or unstable.
The use of a circuit board also creates manufacturing problems due t the difficulty in maintaining the required flatness of the connector assembly. The circuit board for this connector is so small size that signal/ground line symmetry is difficult to achieve, which leads to irregular signal delay for high speed signals through the connector. Further the use of the printed circuit board approach to connector design does not lend itself to coaxial grounding or shielding of the signal lines within the connector housing.
The circuit board connector relies upon a hot-melt adhesive to form a strain relief to help protect the connections between the contact regions on the circuit board and the conductors or wires entering the connector.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,799,314, issued to Ralph Lake, illustrates a scheme for grounding a printed circuit board, where a ground plane on one surface of the circuit board is forced against the support structure and the force is continually applied by means of a screw through the board and threaded into the support There is no disclosure of a connector for connecting another connector to a plurality of wires or a cable, and further the disclosure does not address coaxial shielding.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,806,105, to Steven Z. Muzslay, relates to a connector for interconnecting terminal pins on circuit boards that are stacked in a fixed spatial relation. The interconnecting is accomplished by a shunting bar carried by an insulated housing. The shunting bar has a tuning fork contact that spreads to engage a terminal pin on the printed circuit board. This patent does not address cable connectors and edge contact pads, but rather terminal pins.
Another inter-board connector is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,813,128, issued to Dan Massopust. This inter-board connector is a block of insulated material with holes formed there through. The holes are then through-hole-plated and the plated holes then forced over terminal pins on the printed circuit boards, thereby forming conductive interconnections between adjacent printed circuit boards. This device addresses the needs to interconnect adjacent printed circuit boards; but not cables or wires. It further does not address the need or desirability to coaxially shield the lines or connections.
A technique for creating a face-to-face engagement of two conductors and maintaining a force to insure continuity between the conductors is taught in U.S. Pat. No. 4,902,234, issued to Brodsky et al. The force to engage the sets of conductors in face-to-face engagement is provided by a resiliently deformable material which when compressed will continue to attempt to restore to the original shape and size and thereby force one set of conductors against the other. This tends to assure continuity between the conductors but does not address the need to connect cables or wires to a mating connector and to provide coaxial shielding for the signals lines and signals passing through the connector.